With thousands of like-minded others, I went to the big peace rally in New York City on February 15th, 2003. It was a cold day, and my wife and I walked up Third Avenue from 32nd to 68th Street before we could cut over to First Avenue and join the rally. Which was really a slow march, but since the city government wouldn’t give us a permit to march, let’s call it a rally.

What do we want?
So many things.
When do want them?
It doesn’t seem possible, but now, please.

…March 5th, 2003, Local News: Writer and editor Gavin J. Grant, 33, (picture) of Northampton, Mass., is believed to be one of hundreds of detainees held after police and other government agencies moved in to calm a noisy and potentially-violent peace rally in New York City’s Washington Square Park….

No.6 in the Small Beer Press chapbook series is Benjamin Rosenbaum’s Other Cities. Twelve of the stories in Other Cities were previously published as a weekly series on Strange Horizons. The entire series is presented here for the first time and each story is illustrated with the art of Boston artist and architect Peter Reiss.

The author requested that instead of a royalty, his payment for Other Cities be sent to the Grameen Foundation USA (see below). So on publication we sent along a check for $625 and we are still passing on payments on, thank you. If you would like to donate more to the Grameen Foundation when you buy Other Cities please use this link here and fill in the amount (including $6 for the chapbook). Thank you!

Cities are seemingly inevitable, seductive, depressing, and inebriating. In his Other Cities series Benjamin Rosenbaum takes us on a tour of fourteen imaginary cities:

from “The White City” — where two sisters fight one another and their fate — to Bellur — which celebrates its censors —

from Ponge — that’s already enough about that — to Zvlotsk — where by 1912 detective work accounted for a third of the economy

from Jouiselle-aux-Chantes — the city of erotic forgetting — to Stin — the city for those who are tired of other cities —

Rosenbaum’s stories illuminate the hidden corners of the world the train rider suspects exist at the stop after theirs, the tourist knows the locals will never reveal, and the mapmakers keep for themselves.

Reviews
“Rosenbaum’s fertile sense of invention and his sly humor (“Ponge, as its inhabitants will tell you, is a thoroughly unattractive city. ‘Well,’ they always say at the mention of any horrible news, ‘we do live in Ponge.'”) make these parables a real treat.”
— Asimov’s

“Throughout Other Cities, compressed insight and wonder are compressed into but a handful of words. This small book’s crisp design and illustrations mirror the elegance of the writing: recommended.”
— Xerography Debt

“And though the stories are tiny, they do not disappoint as a result of their brevity. When you leave one fantastic destination behind, there is another city right around the corner.”
— Tangent OnlineContents

“Other Cities by Ben Rosenbaum is a collection of fourteen gems, expertly cut and highly polished. Each contains, within its myriad facets, a metropolis, brimming with mystery, insight and wonder.”
— Jeffrey Ford (The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant)

“Rosenbaum’s little book of cities is like a box of very good chocolates, picked out by a dear friend with an intimate understanding of both confectionary and you. These vignettes are urbane without being arch, sweet without being maudlin, mysterious without being cryptic. Cities are the pinnacle of human acheivment: if you have any doubt, read this.”
— Cory Doctorow (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and A Place So Foreign and Eight More)

“The eloquence and poignancy of each of these stories astonished me. “The City of Peace,” alone, is enough to make one weep. But when read as a whole, Other Cities is not only harrowing, but exhilarating. It’s a fearless exploration into both the heart of darkness and the soul of hope. Here, despair and joy are neither opposites nor antagonists — but husband and wife, brother and sister, yin and yang. In these Cities of Humanity, you won’t meet one without meeting the other.”
— Bradley Denton (One Day Closer to Death: Eight Stabs at Immortality)

Benjamin Rosenbaum is troubled but hopeful. He used to live near Basel, Switzerland, but now he is moving back to the tangled superhighways of Northern Virginia, with his wife Esther, his daughter Aviva, and Aviva’s imaginary friends: Kiko, Makke, and the Happy Boy. He is the author of the collection The Ant King and Other Stories and his stories can be found in Asimov’s, Harper’s, Argosy, F&SF, Strange Horizons, Vestal Review, McSweeney’s, The Infinite Matrix,and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 11.

About the artist:

Peter Reiss was born in Brooklyn, New York. He attended The Cooper Union in New York City; Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy; and the University of Virginia School of Architecture. His artwork focuses on paintings of urban landscapes and abstracted aerial views. He now lives in Boston, Massachusetts with his wife, his sons, and his cats.

About the Grameen Foundation USA:

25% of the gross revenues from the sales of this book go to the Grameen Foundation USA, which fights poverty all over the world by establishing banks that loan very small amounts to very poor people to start businesses, and helping them to coordinate and pool their resources. The effect of microcredit loans is transformative rather than palliative: every year Grameen-style loans lift hundreds of thousands of people above the poverty line. Because of the high repayment rate (typically over 95%), money donated to Grameen is highly leveraged: each dollar donated will be loaned again and again, they can also use services as nation21loans.com-payday loans lenders to get even more money into their businesses. As borrowers become successful in their businesses and begin saving, a Grameen-style bank becomes independent of donations. The original Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which loans $3.8 billion dollars to 2.54 million very poor people, is now self-sufficient.

David Blair‘s poems have appeared in AGNI, The Greensboro Review, International Poetry Review, and Chicago Review.

Gwenda Bond is not a senior administration official.She writes screenplays and fiction, usually in the environs of lovely downtown Lexington, Kentucky, though not usually set there. Her scripts have placed in the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting and Austin Heart of Screenwriting competitions, and her fiction has been published in The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives and …is this a cat? She co-edits the magazine Say… with writer Christopher Rowe.

Hannah Wolf Bowen is a Philosophy major, an assistant editor for the Fortean Bureau, and the person of an ungrateful (yet adorable) horse and a neurotic (yet adorable) dog. Some of her stories have found homes. Others have not. These things happen.

Philip Brewer has a day job as a software engineer, but his work is writing science fiction and fantasy stories. He speaks Esperanto and uses it to communicate with people all over the world. He graduated from Clarion in 2001.

James Campbell writes and draws somewhere to the west of this magazine.

E.L. Chen works hard for the money, so you’d better treat her right. She has been previously published in On Spec and Challenging Destiny. Everything else that she doesn’t mind you knowing can be found here.

F. Brett Cox‘s fiction has been published Century, Black Gate, The North Carolina Literary Review, Indigenous Fiction, Carriage House Review, Say…, and elsewhere. His essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The New England Quarterly, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Paradoxa, Science Fiction Studies, Locus Online, The Robert Frost Encyclopedia, and Science Fiction Weekly. He is co-editor, with Andy Duncan, ofCrossroads: Southern Stories of the Fantastic (Tor, 2004). Brett has served as a juror for the Theodore Sturgeon Award and as a member of the advisory board for the current edition of Contemporary Novelists. He holds an M.A. in English with emphasis in creative writing from the University of South Carolina and a Ph.D. in English with emphasis in American literature from Duke University. A native of North Carolina, Brett is Assistant Professor of English at Norwich University in Northfield,Vermont. He lives in Northfield with his wife, the playwright Jeanne Beckwith.

Eliot Fintushel is an itinerant showman now living in Santa Rosa, CA, hard by the fairgrounds and between the transmission shops and the horse stalls. He has written many stories, mostly published in Asimov’s. His work has been nominated for the Nebula and Sturgeon Awards. He has twice received the NEA Solo Performer Award. His current touring show, employing masks and ancient music in the original tongues, is Apocalypse, a solo performance comprising the entire Book of Revelation word for word in the translation commissioned by King James in 1611!

Geoffrey Goodwin is a generous man who works in a bookshop outside Boston, MA. This is his second story for LCRW. He is not worried by this.

Amy Hannum is an interior designer based in New London, CT. She is the subject and the artist of the cover photo, “Anticipation,” by Mieke Zuiderweg.

Spencer Keralis grew up in Wyoming but now lives in Minneapolis, which is colder. His written work has appeared in The Dry Crik Review of Contemporary Cowboy Poetry, The Owen Wister Review, stet Magazine, and The Plastic Tower, among others. In another life he co-authored a textbook on Asynchronous Transfer Mode circuits now in use at a major telecommunications corporation, but that’s a long story and really not very interesting. (Also: see Zine Reviews.)

Mario Milosevic‘s poems and stories have appeared in dozens of magazines and in the anthologyPoets Against the War. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, novelist Kim Antieau.

Sarah Monette collects ghosts in books, pressing them between the leaves like dried flowers. She has sold stories to LCRW, Alchemy, Tales of the Unanticipated, All Hallows, and Lovecraft’s Weird Mysteries. Her story “Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland,” from LCRW 11, won the 2003 Gaylactic Spectrum Award.

K.Z. Perry‘s stories have recently appeared in MOTA 3: Courage, Talebones, Book of More Flesh, The Urban Bizarre, and Problem Child. She lives in New York.

Rick Polney is an adjunct professor of English and Humanities, a former Army officer, a sometimes performance artist, and an unrepentant risk-taker. He is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop and studied writing under Chip Delany at Temple University. He has been published in TurboCharged Fortune Cookie and Schuylkill.

Tim Pratt lives in Oakland, California, where he works as an assistant editor for Locusmagazine. His stories have appeared in Realms of Fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Strange Horizons, and other nice places, and he has work upcoming in The Third Alternativeand The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives. His first collection, Little Gods, was published by Prime Books in September 2003. With his fiancee Heather Shaw he co-edits a zine calledFlytrap.

Veronica Schanoes is from New York City. She won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Prize from the Academy of American Poets. This is her first non-academic publication. She’s very, very pleased.

David J. Schwartz is the reincarnation of a famous dancing bear who once entertained thousands of Bolivian mine workers. He is indigenous to the Midwestern United States, and traces of his spoor have appeared in On Spec and Flashquake.org. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop and prefers tea, thank you. He keeps a reading journal and he would be humbly pleased if you would read it.

Lucy A. Snyder lives in Columbus, OH. Her writing has appeared in publications such asChiaroscuro, Snow Monkey, Strange Horizons, The Midnighters’ Club and Cumberland House’sGuardian Angels anthology. More information about her can be found here.

Jason Stewart lives between the toes of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. With his two cats, he watches a tiny door in his living room which he has never opened, for fear of finding greebles. When he’s not consumed by these fears, he spends his time at Colorado University where he works in the library and is finishing his BA in English. His work has appeared inAlmagre, Riverrun, and BLAH.

Karina Sumner-Smith is a student, a writer, a Clarion grad and an adventure racing fanatic. She listens to others’ conversations on the bus without hesitation or regret, worries over pennies and scribbles stories on the back of in-class handouts. She is irritated that she must wear her glasses to read signs at distances or distinguish the faces of friends from strangers in a faraway crowd; is it too much to ask to retain one’s vision at the age of 22? She lives in Toronto.

M. Thomas is a writer and teacher in Austin, Texas. She is a short story editor and contributor for the ezine Deep Magic. Her fiction has previously appeared in Deep Magic, Abyss & Apex,and Strange Horizons. She dabbles in magic realism, humor, and young adult fantasy. She maintains a website for writers, and welcomes your visit.

Leslie What is a Jell-O artist and writer from Oregon. Her writing has won awards for drama, nonfiction, and fiction, including a Nebula Award for short story. Her comic novel Olympic Games will be published in 2004. Bigger Better Bio.

Mieke M. Zuiderweg is a photojournalist in Western Massachusetts who is trying to work up the courage to walk away from taking pictures of angry mourners and burning buildings to pursue a career soley based on her photo illustrations and picture experiments. She resides in Northampton but is originally from the Netherlands. Hence the unpronounceable name. “Anticipation” is a photograph of the work of interior designer Amy Hannum.

—

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, No.13 November 2003. ISSN 1544-7782 Text in Bodoni Book. Titles in Imprint MT Shadow. Since 1996 LCRW has usually appeared twice a year. As of 2004, there will be three issues per year: April, July, & November. LCRW springs forth from Small Beer Press, 176 Prospect Ave., Northampton, MA 01060 [email protected] www.lcrw.net/lcrw $4 per single issue or $16/4. Except, as the sharp-eyed observer may have noticed, this issue is $5. This is an experiment (look at that art! look at that binding!) and may or may not be a good idea.

No.7in the Small Beer Press chapbook series is author and publisher Christopher Rowe’s Bittersweet Creek, with a cover illustration by the wonderful Shelley Jackson.

Rowe takes his storytelling seriously and, if he can, with a generous bourbon on the side. (His readings are not to be missed.) Rowe’s recent stories, including “The Force Acting on the Displaced Body” (the lead story in the anthology Trampoline) and “The Voluntary State”, have taken him into new, deep, and exciting literary territory and have brought him many new and appreciative readers. Bittersweet Creek gathers together some of his best stories from recent years and solidifies his reputation as one of the up and coming writers in the speculative fiction field.

Reviews

“Rowe’s work might remind you of that of Andy Duncan. Both exemplify an archetypically Southern viewpoint on life’s mysteries, a worldview that admits marvels in the most common of circumstances and narrates those unreal intrusions in a kind of downhome manner that belies real sophistication.”
— Asimov’s

“As smooth and heady as good Kentucky bourbon”
— Locus

“‘Men of Renown’ is a herald of what Rowe can do best: deal with time and place without limits.”
—Tangent Online

This smart, sleek, scary little book is all about strange arrivals: girls coming up out of their graves, giants from their junkyards, dragons from their river beds. Add Rowe himself– striding out of the Kentucky hills into the sunlight of literature’s regard. And he looks good doing it.— Terry Bisson (The Pickup Artist)

Christopher Rowe’s stories are the kind of thing you want on a cold, winter’s night when the fire starts burning low. They dance through godfearing communities in the deep country with the unerring steps of a shaman’s rite to show that the division between Biblical and primal deities is a perilous conceit. Reverent and irreverent in the same breath, chilling and funny by turns, they deliver the full measure required of short story tellers the world over; entertainment plus x, where x is a measure of internal vertigo caused by a sudden glimpse of a sheer drop. Terrific.—Justina Robson (Natural History)

Christopher Rowe was a fine writer when he was one of my students back at Clarion West, in 1996; and he has only gotten better. Much better. And as good as he is now, he’ll keep getting better. Read these excellent stories, and see what I mean.
–Jack Womack (Going, Going, Gone)

About the Author:

Rowe’s story, “The Force Acting on the Displaced Body”, is the lead story in the anthology Trampoline — for which he answered these questions. He lives in Lexington, KY. His fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in Realms of Fantasy, JPPN, Pulp Eternity, The Dead Mule, and the anthologies Beyond the Last Star and Swan Sister: Fairy Tales Retold.

Rowe’s poem “Our Prize Patrol Will Find You” was published in LCRW 9. He is the editor and publisher (with Gwenda Bond) of the magazine Say….

Christopher Rowe, The Force Acting on the Displaced Body
— interview
— chapbookChristopher Rowe lives in Kentucky. His fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in many magazines, webzines and zine zines. He runs a small press, the Fortress of Words, and edits a zine, Say… He likes outside better than inside, brick better than vinyl and made better than bought.

You can buy Say… if you poke around on this site a little bit more. You can read some of his stories online at The Dead Mule,Ideomancer, and maybe even Small Beer.

Ed Park, Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts

Ed Park is the author of a few published stories that have changed the way we see the world, two unpublished novels that haven’t, an unpublished memoir in which every paragraph begins with “In,” and two books illustrated by the fabulous Michael K. Carter. He is a senior editor at The Village Voice, where he reviews films, books, theater, and music. With Heidi Julavits, he co-edits The Believer. He contributes to the Canadian magazine Cinema Scope and belongs to the Harry Stephen Keeler Society, the New York Society Library, and the Duane Reade Dollar Rewards Club.

John Gonzalez grew up in Battle Creek, Michigan, the Cereal Capital of the World. He spent much of his early life trying to escape, but the attack dogs seemed to anticipate his every move. After several years in graduate school and employment as a social worker, John landed a job as the house writer for Outrage Games, a videogame developer in Ann Arbor whose next game, the fantasy-SF action-adventure Alter Echo, is due out in August 2003. In 2001 he attended the Clarion Writers Workshop. “Impala” is his first publication.

O

Samantha Hunt, Famous Men (Three Stories)

Samantha Hunt is a writer and artist from New York. Much to her delight, her stories and poems have appeared in McSweeney’s, Jubilat, Swerve, The Iowa Review, Literary, Colorado and Western Humanities Reviews. Her first play, The Difference Engine, a story about the life of Charles Babbage, is currently in production. Hunt’s artwork can be found at the New York Public Library. Of late, she is completing a novel.

Alex Irvine‘s first novel A Scattering of Jades appeared in 2002 from Tor Books. His second, One King, One Soldier, is scheduled for July 2004. In between, a short-story collection, Unintended Consequences,will appear from Subterranean Press. He has published short fiction inF&SF, Asimov’s, Sci Fiction,Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and anthologies including Starlight 3, Polyphony 2, and Live Without a Net.He teaches English at Gardiner Area High School in Gardiner, Maine — the home of Edwin Arlington Robinson — and lives in Portland, Maine, with his wife, Beth, and twins, Emma and Ian.

Greer Gilman’s novel, Moonwise, is decidedly thorny. It won the Crawford Award and was shortlisted for the Tiptree and Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards. “A Crowd of Bone” is one of three linked stories, variations on a winter myth. The first, “Jack Daw’s Pack,” was a Nebula finalist for 2001, and the subject of a Foundationinterview by Michael Swanwick. A sometime forensic librarian, Gilman lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and travels in stone circles.

Alan DeNiro is a graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Virginia, and he also attended Clarion in 1998. His fiction has appeared in many literary and genre venues, including Santa Monica Review, 3rd Bed, Strange Horizons,Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet,Fence, Talebones, and his work has been shortlisted for the O. Henry award. Along with Chris Barzak, Kristin Livdahl, and Barth Anderson, he is a member of the writerly and publishing co-op known as the Ratbastards. He has recently completed a novel, The Memory Palace of Ray Fell, which involves the perils of dating imaginary people. He regularly reviews fiction for Rain Taxi, and is a correspondent for the weblog Ptarmigan. He is also the author of two poetry chapbooks: The Black Hare and Atari Ecologues. Finally, he is a failed trapeze artist…no, just kidding.

Maureen McHugh (1959) has spent most of her life in Ohio, but has lived in New York City and, for a year, in Shijiazhuang, China. Her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, won the Tiptree Award. Her latest novel is Nekropolis, which was a BookSense 76 pick and a New York TimesEditor’s Choice. Right now she lives with her husband, son and two dogs next to a dairy farm. Sometimes, in the summer, black and white Holsteins look over the fence at them.

Dave Shaw lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife Natalie, three-year-old daughter Mia, and newest child, Henry (born May 17, 2003). Father was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Here Comes the Roar, which willbe published by University of North Texas Press in 2003. His stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies in England, Japan, New Zealand, and the U.S., including Best American Mystery Stories, The Southern Anthology, Literal Latte, Stand Magazine, and publications you’ve never heard of. He has received The Literal Latte Fiction Award, The Southern Prize for Fiction, a North Carolina Arts Council Writer’s Fellowship, and other awards for his work, and he completed his MFA in Fiction Writing at UNC-Greensboro. With that out of the way, he’d like now to point out that in 2000, 2001, and 2002, his team won Carrboro, North Carolina’s Co-Rec Softball Championship.

O

Susan Mosser, Bump Ship

Susan Mosser has been writing for a while now and finds it to be just the very best part of sentience. By grace of unemployment, in the steamy wastelands of central Florida, she is writing two books (one novel and one mostly not) and ghost-editing a third, and lately has taken to scribbling bits of subtly rhythmic verse on gasoline receipts while driving. Susan is a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop.

Vandana Singh was born and raised in India and now lives in the United States with her husband, daughter, dog and innumerable books. She draws upon her background in physics and her experience as a woman and an Indian to spin wild tales of science fiction and fantasy. Her first published story appeared in the original anthology Polyphony, Volume 1.

O

Glen Hirshberg, Shipwreck Beach

Glen Hirshberg‘s first novel, The Snowman’s Children, was published by Carroll & Graf in December, 2002. Kelly said she liked it. His ghost stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and Dark Terrors 6, and have been nominated for the International Horror Guild Award and twice for the World Fantasy Award. Carroll & Graf will publish The Two Sams, a collection of his supernatural fiction, later this year. When he sent this bio, Glen lived in Los Angeles with his wife, son, and daughter, but he probably doesn’t anymore.

Jeffrey Ford is the author of a trilogy of novels from Eos Harper Collins — The Physiognomy(winner of the 1998 World Fantasy Award and a New York TimesNotable Book of the year for ’97), Memoranda (a New York Times Notable book for ’99), The Beyond( a selection for Washington Post Book World’s Best of 2001 list). His most recent novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque(Morrow/Harper Collins), was published in June 2002 as was his first story collection, The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant & Other Stories(Golden Gryphon Press). His short fiction has appeared in the magazines — Fantasy & Science Fiction, Sci Fiction, Event Horizon, Black Gate, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet,MSS, The Northwest Review, Puerto Del Sol — and in the anthologies — Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, Vols. 13 and 15, The Green Man: Tales From the Mythic Forest, Leviathan #3, and The Journal of Pulse Pounding Narratives. “The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant,” (short story) was nominated for a Nebula Award in 2001, and “Creation” (short story) was nominated for a Nebula in 2002. Ford lives in South Jersey with his wife, Lynn, and two sons, Jack and Derek. He teaches Writing and Literature at Brookdale Community College in Monmouth County, New Jersey.

Beth Adele Long‘s short fiction has appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristletand Electric Velocipede. She is a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s workshop and a former writer-in-residence at the Kerouac House in Orlando. By day she works as a graphic arts jack-of-all-trades for a fantabulous little company in Cape Canaveral. She lives in Florida and still complains about the cold winters, much to her northern friends’ disgust.

“I was a dreadful student. Just squeaked by with Cs and a few Ds. Failed freshman English and had to repeat it. Almost failed again.”

I went all the way through music school, playing the violin, but I had slow fingers so failed at that.”

I went to war. ALL! the men were gone so, though I was a pacifist, I went with them. After war, I went to art school. First thing I didn’t fail at.”

I always hated writing. It’s too hard. But, like finally learning to love lobster, now Lobster is my favorite. I’ve failed at even that though. I’ve become allergic to it. Now I love writing. I love that it is so hard–that you never stop learning how to do it.”

I’ve just had two new books with Small Beer Press. These are my seventh and eighth books.”

Christopher Barzak has published stories in a variety of literary and speculative fiction magazines, including Nerve, Realms of Fantasy,Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet,Strange Horizons,The Vestal Review, and The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. He has recently completed his Master’s Degree in English at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio. He grew up in rural Ohio, now lives in post-industrial Ohio, has lived in California and Michigan, now lives in an attic back in post-industrial Ohio, has no pets to speak of, no longer smokes except socially, and likes to dance. He is 27.

Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s fiction and prose poems have appeared in Conjunctions(Web Conjunctions); Washington Square; Skidrow Penthouse; Phantasmagoria; Literal Latte; Reflections (published by the United Nations Society of Writers); No Roses Review; and White Crow, among other literary journals. Her prose poems “The Maria Axiom” and “Soul Murder” have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her short story, “The Guest,” won the Anne and Henry Paolucci fiction contest for Italian-American writing, and the Negative Capability annual fiction contest. Rosalind lives in New York City where she is currently completing a second collection of short fiction.

Richard Butner is a freelance journalist and short story writer. Hell, he might even write a novel soon. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. He loves you.

Richard Butner is a freelance journalist and short story writer. He runs the Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference with John Kessel. For some reason he holds an M.S. in Computer Engineering (with an English minor) and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, both from North Carolina State University.

Karen Joy Fowler is the author of two story collections and three novels and is a frequent teacher of writing workshops. She lives with her husband in Davis, California. She wishes someday to have published more books than you can count on the fingers of both hands. She wishes this more often than she manages to actually make herself work on book number six. She’s starting to think the opposable thumb is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Emperors, empresses, storytellers, thieves . . . and the Natural History of Ferrets

Kalpa Imperial is the first of Argentinean writer Angélica Gorodischer’s nineteen award-winning books to be translated into English. In eleven chapters, Kalpa Imperial’s multiple storytellers relate the story of a fabled nameless empire which has risen and fallen innumerable times. Fairy tales, oral histories and political commentaries are all woven tapestry-style into Kalpa Imperial: beggars become emperors, democracies become dictatorships, and history becomes legends and stories.

But Kalpa Imperial is much more than a simple political allegory or fable. It is also a celebration of the power of storytelling. Gorodischer and acclaimed writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who has translated Kalpa Imperial, are a well-matched, sly and delightful team of magician-storytellers. Rarely have author and translator been such an effortless pairing. Kalpa Imperial is a powerful introduction to the writing of Angélica Gorodischer, a novel which will enthrall readers already familiar with the worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin.

“The history of an imaginary empire in a series of tales that adopt the voice of a marketplace storyteller. . . . While the point of each tale eludes paraphrase, the cumulative burden is the imperfectibility of human society . . . Le Guin’s translation, which ranges from blunt to elegant to oracular, seems like the ideal medium for this grim if inescapable message.”
— New York Times Book Review

* “This Scheherazade-like collection of linked tales, loosely connected by a storyteller, form the rich history of an imaginary civilization from its hunter-gatherer origins to its peak as a technologically sophisticated empire. Each story is concerned with the use and abuse of power, especially the inequities of power between men and women, the rich and the poor, and the state and the individual. Never heavy-handed, the stories flow like fables and gradually show the futility of seeking power and trying to rule others. The dreamy, ancient voice is not unlike Le Guin’s, and this collection should appeal to her fans as well as to those of literary fantasy and Latin American fiction.”
—Library Journal (Starred Review)

“There’s a very modern undercurrent to the Kalpa empire, with tales focusing on power (in a political sense) rather than generic moral lessons. Her mythology is consistent — wide in scope, yet not overwhelming. The myriad names of places and people can be confusing, almost Tolkeinesque in their linguistic originality. But the stories constantly move and keep the book from becoming overwhelming. Gorodischer has a sizeable body of work to be discovered, with eighteen books yet to reach English readers, and this is an impressive introduction.”
— Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Those looking for offbeat literary fantasy will welcome Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was, by Argentinean writer Angélica Gorodischer. Translated from the Spanish by Ursula Le Guin, this is the first appearance in English of this prize-winning South American fantasist.”
— Publishers Weekly

Angélica Gorodischer, daughter of the writer Angélica de Arcal, was born in 1929 in Buenos Aires and has lived most of her life in Rosario, Argentina. From her first book of stories, she has displayed a mastery of science-fiction themes, handled with her own personal slant, and exemplary of the South American fantasy tradition. Oral narrative techniques are a strong influence in her work, most notably in Kalpa Imperial, which since its publication has been considered a major work of modern fantasy narrative.

Here’s a fuller bio:

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on July 28th 1928, lives in Rosario, Argentina, since 1936. Fifteen books published, novels and short stories. Never a play; never a poem, not even at sixteen when everybody writes poems, out of love or of politics. Elementary and high school at the Escuela Normal no.2 de Profesoras in Rosario. And then School of Arts and Literature, Rosario National University but only for five years. No grade, no academic award, no nothing: wanted to write, not to teach.
Books: Short Stories with Soldiers, 1965; Opus Two, novel, 1967, 1990; The Wigs,short stories, 1968; Under the Yubayas in Bloom, short stories, 1973, 1987; Chaste Electronic Moon, short stories, 1977; Trafalgar, short stories, 1979, 1984 and 1986; Imperial Kalpa, novel, 1983, 1990, 2000, 2001; A Bad Night, short stories, 1983, 1997; Vases of Alabaster, Boukhara Carpets, novel, 1985, 1992; Mango Juice, novel, 1988; The Republics, short stories, 1991; Fable of the Virgin and the Fireman, novel, 1993; Survivorship Techniques, short stories, 1994; The Night of the Innocent, novel, 1996; How to Succeed in Life, short stories, 1998; Mint, short stories, 2000;Everywhere, novel, 2002.
Awards: 1964 “Vea & Lea” award, III contest of detective stories; 1965 “Club del Orden” award; 1984 “Más Allá” award; 1984 “Poblet” award; 1984-85 Emecé award; 1985 “Sigfried Radaelli Club de los Trece”; 1986, 1991 Gigamesh (Spain); 1994 “Platinum Konex” for her work on sci-fi; 1996 “Dignity” award granted by the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights for works and activity in women’s rights; 1998 Silvina Bullrich award, granted by the Argentina Writers’ Society to the best novel written by a woman during the three precedent years; 2000: “Margarita de Ponce” award, granted by the Union of Argentine Women.
Short stories in anthologies in Argentina and other countries. Seminars, conferences, meetings, conventions, etc. in Argentina and other countries. More than 300 lectures (not counting papers at meetings or conferences) especially on fantastic narrative and gender and literature. Judge at literary contests from 1967 to the present. Book presentations, public reading of short stories. Workshops for women who want to write. Articles and short stories in newspapers and magazines in Argentina and other countries.
A husband (for 50 years the same one), two sons, one daughter-in-law, a daughter, a son-in-law, six grandchildren, a house, a garden, many many friends . . . in Argentina and other countries.

“Camera Obscura” translated by Diana L. Velez, The Latin American Literary Review, XIX, 37:96-105. Special Issue: Scents of Wood and Silence: Short Stories by Latin American Women Writers.

About the Translator

Ursula Kroeber was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, where she grew up. Her parents were the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, author of Ishi. She went to Radcliffe College, and did graduate work at Columbia University. She married Charles A. Le Guin, a historian, in Paris in 1953; they have lived in Portland, Oregon, since 1958, and have three children and three grandchildren.

Ursula K. Le Guin has written poetry and fiction all her life. Her first publications were poems, and in the 1960’s she began to publish short stories and novels. She writes both poetry and prose, and in various modes including realistic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, young children’s books, books for young adults, screenplays, essays, verbal texts for musicians, and voicetexts for performance or recording. As of 2003 she has published over a hundred short stories (collected in nine volumes), two collections of essays, twelve books for children, five volumes of poetry, two of translation, and nineteen novels. Among the honors her writing has received are a National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, five Hugo Awards, and five Nebula Awards.

In August 2003 the University of New Mexico Press published Ursula’s translation of Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral — “This is the first presentation in English and Spanish of a really substantial selection of the poetry of Mistral — the first Latin American, and the only Latin American woman, to receive the Nobel Prize.”

Praise for the Spanish-language editions of Kalpa Imperial:

“Angélica Gorodischer, both from without and within the novel, accomplishes the indispensable function Salman Rushdie says the storyteller must have: not to let the old tales die out; to constantly renew them. And she well knows, as does that one who met the Great Empress, that storytellers are nothing more and nothing less than free men and women. And even though their freedom might be dangerous, they have to get the total attention of their listeners and, therefore, put the proper value on the art of storytelling, an art that usually gets in the way of those who foster a forceful oblivion and prevent the winds of change.”
—Carmen Perilli, La Gaceta, Tucuman

“At a time when books are conceived and published to be read quickly, with divided attention in the din of the subway or the car, this novel is to be tasted with relish, in peace, in moderation, chewing slowly each and every one of the stories that make it up, and digesting it equally slowly so as to properly assimilate it all.”
—Rodolfo Martinez

“A vast, cyclical filigree . . . Gorodischer reaches much farther than the common run of stories about huge empires, maybe because she wasn’t interested in them to begin with, and enters the realm of fable, legend, and allegory.”
—Luis G. Prado, Gigamesh, Barcelona

The little creek behind my trailer in Kentucky is called Frankum Branch. I had to go to the courthouse to find that out. Nobody around here thought it had a name. But all the little creeks and branches in the world have names, even if nobody remembers them, or remembers which Frankum they’re named after.

Cheap pens. My marriage is not going to survive this. Not the pens — I bought the pens because no pen is safe when Mark is around; his backpack is a black hole for pens — so I bought this package of cheap pens, one of which doesn’t work (although rather than throw it away, I stuck it back in the pen jar, which is stupid), and two of them don’t click right when you try to make the point come out and then go back. It’s good to have them, though, because I’m manning the phone. Tim, my husband, is out combing the Buckeye Trail in the National Park with volunteers, looking for my nine-year-old stepson, Mark. Mark has been missing for twenty-two hours. One minute he was with them, the next minute he wasn’t. I am worried about Mark. I am sure that if he is dead, I will feel terrible. I wish I liked him better. I wish I’d let him take some of these pens. Not that Tim will ever find out that I told Mark he couldn’t have any of these pens.

One day Roy Barlowe and his dad walked up the hill to Townie Harpe’s old place. Townie’s widow, Miss Erskine, was sitting on a cane bottom chair on the porch, fooling with some clothes.

Roy didn’t know whether she was sewing or quilting or doing some kind of mending. He never paid much attention to that kind of work. Still, if the mother knew those ways then it followed that the daughter would.

Download a 44MB mp3 audio file of Richard Butner reading “Ash City Stomp.”She had dated Secrest for six weeks before she asked for the Big Favor. The Big Favor sounded like, “I need to get to Asheville to check out the art therapy program in their psychology grad school,” but in reality she had hard drugs that needed to be transported to an old boyfriend of hers in the mountains, and the engine in her 1982 Ford Escort had caught fire on the expressway earlier that spring.

“No unblinkered, gloveless reader can resist the stream of associations unleashed by Ford’s story and the rest of Trampoline: influences as disparate as science fiction, magic realism, pulp, and Twilight Zone morality plays.”— Village Voice

“In short, Trampoline is yet another unique source of powerful, exciting, new approaches to fantasy and interstitial fiction. It is flexible enough and fresh enough that I hope it proves to be the beginning of a series. It occupies its own rather beautifully fragile place in the fantastical fiction milieu.”
— Jeff VanderMeer, Locus Online

“The editor should be commended, not only for an intriguing compilation…but that she manages to stay out of the way of it. The only thing that intrudes here is her taste in the story selection and ordering. There’s no tiresome manifesto here, no chest-beating about movements or genres or rants against publishing mediocrity and how some merry band of rogues is going to revolutionize anything. She understands that the role of editor is to let the work speak for itself.”
— SF Site

For a mere $17 you and your friends around the world can read the finest fiction we’ve been able to find collected in one solid, easy to throw across the room, bouncy package.

Story selections have appeared (and maybe disappear) online. A roundtable interview is now bouncing across hypertext. All over the country home insurance companies will inquire, “Do you have a Trampoline?”

O

Ok, but who are these people? — photos, biographies, links to websites and blogs, news on
trampolining activities (parties and readings?), and maybe some other bouncy fun.

T he little creek behind my trailer in Kentucky is called Frankum Branch.R amnath Mishra’s life changed forever one morning,A ll this started when my father told my mother she was a waste.M argaret, do you see the leaves?P ristine silence was the law in the gleaming white halls of The Center for the Reification of Actual Probability.O ne day when I was in the first grade Scott Arnold told me he was going to wash my face with snow on my way home from school.L ately, Walter has been hard to live with.I t’s the start of a brand new life, Johnny.”N b. No story begins with the letter N. Is that odd? Should we be worried?E xclusion Rights for minors?

O

A partial index of this anthology.
A poem, not connected to this anthology.

O

Available in all good book stores, libraries, coffee shops, Chuck e Cheese, and State Fairs.O

Vanilla Sky is told from the point of view of David Aames, a good looking (hey, he’s Tom Cruise!), millionaire (his father published TV Guide!), playboy (Cameron Diaz swallowed his cum — that means something!) who is not without his dark moments (his parents killed by a drunk driver!). Instead of a bat flying through his window to give direction to his life, this Bruce Wayne meets the batty Sofia Serrano, played by Penelope Cruz, and everything changes.

This is not a film review. The point of this essay is to trash the movie to explain how it could have (should have!) been better. So consider that your spoiler warning, combined with my opinion that this movie isn’t really worth watching in its current form anyway.

Release came not as I expected — burdened with fines, restrictions, armed guard, and list of warnings longer than my conscience. Instead I walked away entirely free. The doctors, inquisitors, and officials did not visit my cell in the morning as they usually did. Only the middle-aged woman named Ardis entered the cell, without a guard. She arrived with the breakfast tray consisting of nothing out of the ordinary with its simple roll, butter, dab of marmalade, and small red pot of black tea. I stared at the tray trying to assess what was different. Had the commissary taken a second longer in arranging the items across the yellow plastic? Had the usual disarray of items proved unsatisfactory this day? The normally skewed angles of napkin, butter knife, and spoon — had they demanded straightening today? In my brief look at the tray I could see the kitchen help had thought to cut into a fresh lemon for the tea saucer, instead of reaching for a slice remaining from the day before. Or perhaps Ardis personally had overseen the assembly of this breakfast, even stopping to straighten its contents as she stood in the hall outside my cell. As she placed it on the immovable round table near the bed, she did so with greater care than usual.Read more

No.5in the Small Beer Press chapbook series is Foreigners, and Other Familiar Faces — written and illustrated by Wisconsin writer Mark Rich. Each of the nine stories (three of which are published here for the first time) is illustrated by Mark.

Reviews

“This chapbook of nine stories by Mark Rich offers a fine selection of some truly imaginative fiction. The stories fall open without warning, speaking their own languages with unfamiliar cadence, insisting that you give them your full attention if you plan to attend to them at all. Mark Rich has a little bit of Richard Brautigan in him, something magical in his sentences that charms, even when you don’t understand where they are taking you. My love affair with fiction has become complicated since I finished grad school, and I am heartened when I discover stories that remind me of the inherent beauty of language, and the way it can sparkle when used in the right hands (his are the right hands).”
— Xerography Debt, no.12

Is he A) The jaunty, offbeat stories of Mark Rich have appeared since the 1980s in venues ranging from small humor and literary zines to the slick pages of science fiction monthlies. Since the appearance of his first collection of stores, Lifting (Wordcraft of Oregon, 1991), he has published three books about toys, including the dictionary-style compendium Toys A to Z (Krause Publications, 2001). He writes a multitude of columns about toy history for collecting magazines, pens the occasional drawing, such as the ones found in this chapbook, and leads the rock band Mad Melancholy Monkey Mind, which performs in the central Wisconsin area where he makes his home with partner and fellow musician Martha Borchardt. They have no pets.

Is he B) Mark Rich first wrote stories as a child in Colorado in the 1960s. He began publishing occasional poems and reviews in newspapers and zines in his teens, and started two speculative poetry zines before entering college. In some ways, entering college meant the end to his early writing efforts, although he did win a poetry prize and edited the campus newspaper during this time. He earned a degree in music from Beloit College in 1980. In the early 1980s he made his income from a combination of music, artwork, and writing, more the first two than the last; and as a secretary and occasional house painter and cleaning person. His income never rose above the poverty level for fifteen years. In the ’80s he co-founded The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, with Roger Dutcher; managed the Turtle Creek Food Co-op in Beloit, Wis.; worked parttime as editorial assistant and arts reviewer for the Beloit Daily News; participated in local art exhibits, with awards including a Juror’s Award in a regional show; and formed the short-lived bands Auto Da Fe and the Glass Doves. His first collection of short stories, Lifting,appeared in 1991 from David Memmott’s press, Wordcraft of Oregon. Though a small book, it won the Leslie Cross award from the Council of Wisconsin Writers. Afterwards his fiction began appearing in the professional press, beginning with Amazing Stories and Bantam anthology Full Spectrum 4. In the mid-1990s he became a regular contributor to Analog; and he published the letters-oriented zine Kornblume: Kornbluthiana, focusing on the life and works of Cyril Kornbluth. In the late 1990s, he began contributing columns about toy collecting and toy history to collecting magazines, and since then has published three books on toy history. In 2001 he established the band Mad Melancholy Monkey Mind with his partner in life and music, Martha Borchardt. The band’s first CD, Drive, appeared in 2002. Now a five-piece ensemble, the band performs in the central Wisconsin area.

Or C) Mark Rich’s life has been largely unsatisfactory, from the point of view of those who measure accomplishment by the bottom results of a balance sheet. He has, however, provided some help to a few prairie plants and miscellaneous amphibians; has published a few verses; has published a few drawings; has bought people a few beers; has put together and taken apart a few bands; has published a great number of photographs, mostly of toys; has published hundreds of thousands of words about toys; has helped out a few souls in meager literary ways; has published a few stories; has published a few books; has published a little literary criticism; has rescued a few earthworms; has cooked some good meals; has mixed some fine classic martinis; has drunk some excellent beers; has gone on some excellent walks; has provided a source of worry to his family; has read some good books; has grown a few longs hairs; and has grown a few gray hairs. This is his second collection of short stories.

Or some combination. Or all three. Or something else entirely??

Here’s his website, where you can find out more about the man, the music, the toys, oh yes, the toys.

Mark’s art was featured in LCRW 11 and on the cover of LCRW 5. His short story, “Delivery”, appeared in LCRW 9.

Mark’s been writing for years, and has been published in Tales of the Unanticipated, Analog, Amazing Stories, Science Fiction Age, The Silver Web, Keen Science Fiction, Plot, Palace Corbie, Nova 5, and the anthologies The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Eleventh Annual Collection, Universe 3, Full Spectrum 4… etc., etc.

Some of the stories in Foreigners, and Other Familiar Faceswere previously published in the following places:

The theme for our ten year grad reunion was “Happy Days.” I’m not sure why this particular show was selected, as we had graduated long after the ’50s, and the series had been cancelled before most of us met in high school. I’m not even sure why we needed a theme — a reunion wasn’t a prom. But I guess “Happy Days” generated a feeling of nostalgia that the organizers hoped would rub off on our event, and few people could claim they had never seen an episode.

Michiko’s servant girl Mai carried the deep pink lantern to light their way through the dark city streets. Mai was dead. Since Michiko was, too, that didn’t seem so strange. In fact, very little about the situation struck Michiko as odd or even very different from when she was alive. She did have one regret, however — her feet. Michiko missed having feet.

Catchie hears first. “‘mam! Noisy in the ground!”Spitmam scoops away sleep and releasing Catchie from her bed grasp, listens for the disturbance beyond the cottage.“Hear? Under rock, ‘mam! Under and deep, calling to the folk!”“You say, you say.” In a grumbly witter, Spitmam swings on her longcoat and unlodges the door. The night’s cold as groundstone, but Spitmam bends stiff knees to lay an ear to one of the pathway flags.“You’re hearing it,” she tells the girl quietly. “That thumping’s surely under. And a grand thing’s there!”

Nonfiction

Jack Cheng — Mesopotamians, All
Richard Butner — How to Make a Martini

“I drink so I can talk to assholes. This includes me.” — James Douglas Morrison

Drink what you like, so you can talk to assholes including yourself. But. But you might want to have a martini. And here’s how to make one.First off, martinis are made of gin and vermouth. If you make one with vodka, it’s not a martini; it’s a vodka martini. If you make one without vermouth, it’s not a martini, it’s cold gin, which is a perfectly fine KISS song but perhaps not a perfectly fine beverage.The state of being in a martini glass does not instantly confer martini-hood on any given concoction. Some perfectly fine drinks are served in martini glasses (aka cocktail glasses, as opposed to old-fashioned glasses or Collins glasses or cordial glasses). Gimlets, say. Hell, even Lemon Drops. There is no such thing as a Choco-Banana Martini, though.

L. Timmel Duchamp — What’s the Story? Reading Deena Metzger’s The Woman Who Slept with Men to Take the War Out of ThemZines reviews & credits
William Smith — The Film Column: Don’t Look Now

Jennifer Rachel Baumer lives in Reno, Nevada, with her husband/best friend/sometime editor Rick and a rapidly expanding number of cats. She wrote “Spirits” at Clarion after news from home of a shooting at the local market. When not writing fiction Jennifer can be found procrastinating on writing nonfiction, from which she makes a tentative living.

Richard Butner is a freelance journalist and short story writer. Hell, he might even write a novel soon. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. He loves you. Read his story “Other Agents” from LCRWno.5. His story “Ash City Stomp” provided the inspiration for Shelley Jackson’s painting for the cover of Trampoline.

Jack Cheng works on archaeological excavations in Turkey and Syria. He is writing a book on Assyrian music when not playing with his new son Austin. Earlier contributions to LCRW include a review of Vanilla Sky, an email exchange in no.7, and illustrations in no.4.

Lena DeTar is currently teaching English in Nara, Japan. She will be attending a Science Writing (journalism) MA program at Johns Hopkins next year. As for philosophy, she may be Buddhist. Or not. It deserves more meditation.

L. Timmel Duchamp is a regular columnist for LCRW. She has published a prodigious quantity of fiction in addition to a modest number of essays. She is an editor at Fantastic Metropolis.Intrepid voyagers may discover and explore her work here.

Jan Lars Jensen grew up in Yarrow, B.C. and currently lives in Calgary, Alberta. His first novel, Shiva 3000, was published by Harcourt in North America and Macmillan in the U.K. Raincoast Books will publish a nonfiction work, tentatively titled Nervous System, in 2004.

Nick Mamatas is the author of the Bram Stoker Award-losing short novel Northern Gothic(Soft Skull Press) and of short stories appearing in Razor, Strange Horizons, Wide Angle NY, and The Whirligig. This bio is already longer than his story, so just look at his website.

Christoph Meyer lives in Danville, OH. He is an enthusiast. His zine, 28 Pages Lovingly Bound with Twine, is indeed that, and should be read.

Nancy Jane Moore‘s fiction has appeared in various anthologies, some magazines, and the occasional webzine, but this is the first time her poetry has appeared anywhere besides her high school literary magazine. Her story “Three O’Clock in the Morning” appeared in LCRWno.8.

David Erik Nelson currently lives somewhere in America with his anonymous fiancee and X number of dogs. He has never been associated with the publication Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k), and asks that you disregard that vile, scurrilous rag entirely.

Richard Parks lives in Mississippi with his wife and three cats. His work has appeared inAsimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and numerous anthologies. His first short story collection, The Ogre’s Wife: Fairy Tales for Grownups, was published in 2002 by Obscura Press.

A contemporary fantasy/magic realist novel by Ursula Pflug, Green Music has recently been released by Tesseract Books. Pflug has had over forty short stories professionally published, at home in Canada and internationally in both speculative and mainstream venues, in print and on the web (Holy Mackerels, Late for Dinner, Sky Rise, Python). She has frequently written about art and books for Toronto’s Now Magazine and other venues, worked in editorial for three years at the cultural journal The Peterborough Review, and co-written several short films including,Memory Lapse At The Waterfront — based on a published Pflug short story, it has shown at festivals and has been sold to television. Pflug has taught writing workshops to both adults and children. She has read her short fiction at countless public readings. She has received several Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council grants in support of her fiction; her theatre work has also been supported by the OAC and by the Laidlaw Foundation. She has had three plays professionally staged and has been writing and performing with Seaskum, a Peterborough based all girl comedy troupe. She is a member of SF Canada and Broad Universe. Formerly a full time graphic artist, she has concentrated on her writing since moving to the rural Kawarthas from Toronto with her family, fifteen years ago. In their spare time, they are building a teleporter together.

Philip Raines and Harvey Welles have published stories in The Fractal, New Genre, and Albedo One, and have won the UK Bridport Prize short story competition. Phil is a member of the Glasgow Science Fiction Writers Circle. Harvey lives in Milwaukee.

Anne Sheldon was born in Washington, DC, in 1945. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Spitball, Weird Tales, and Edge City Review, among other small magazines, and in a chapbook,Lancastrian Letters, and a book,Hero-Surfing. She is a poet-in-the-schools, working through the Maryland State Arts Council, and teaches storytelling at the library school of the University of Maryland.

William Smith is a regular columnist for LCRW. He is on the cusp of publishing a zine, Trunk Stories. We are note with awe that his review of Don’t Look Now did not include a reference tothat scene.

Cara Spindler lives in Michigan and teaches creative writing, in high schools for money and prisons for free. Her poetry has most recently appeared in The Driftwood Review, Poor Mojo’s Almanac, and Spinning Jenny.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, No.12 June 2003. LCRW appears twice a year from Small Beer Press, 176 Prospect Ave., Northampton, MA 01060 [email protected]www.lcrw.net/lcrw $4 per single issue or $16/4. Contents the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, &c. should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. Thanks for those, Richard. No extras this time, no footnotes, no recipes spelled out in the first letter of each story (see no. 8). Apples, etc. read from back to front. Remove the figure from the head, what’s left? Is there a ship? Is there a state? There is a state, disunited. Mostly, when we read the news, we are sad. It is annoying to feel so sad and useless. We want to revolt, but non-violently, because we do not believe in violence. The ends don’t justify those means and all that. But what does it mean when every day, every day, another freedom is taken away, another imbalance is made law, another good law (yes, good) is wiped off the books. Revolution now.